Growing up, I remember many of these “futurisms.” But I was looking at ten- and twenty-year-old magazines. I was living in that future, and those things didn’t exist. So early on I became jaded.

As I grew up, I discovered I was wrong. Some of these magical things did, in fact, exist. Very few of them were in those magazines, however. More of them followed from period literature (pocket calculators and geosynchronous satellites) than from gaudier magazines. So I began to read with an active filter, looking at what could actually be done, and how new products from engineering journals could enable the dream products of yesteryear. I tried building things that worked, rather than simply dreaming about them, and found out how hard that really is.

These days I’ve joined a local hacker-space. I have a background in electronic hardware and cloud computing, and I look at projects the group wants to engage with an eye to, “how can we make this happen with available technology?” I used to dream about the future and how technology could make the future happen; now I live in the future and make it happen every day.

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